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A Creek Runs Through It

A Storybook Life in Temescal

People who live in Temescal tend to stay. “There’s almost no turnover here,” says Berkeley Choate. His enchanting storybook cottage, complete with brick walkways and leaded windows, is right on Temescal Creek. In fact, the creek flows between his home and the road, so guests must cross one of two rustic wooden footbridges to approach the house.

“The whole property is about outdoorsy-ness and woodsy-ness,” says Choate. “After a big rain, the creek can be a roaring torrent,” he says. “The creek is spring-fed and almost never runs dry.”

The house where Choate lives with his wife, Colette Bischer-Choate, a marriage and family therapist, and their 6-year-old son Patrick, is typical of the neighborhood—if any one style of architecture can be called typical. When the neighborhood was built in the 1920s, developers designed Carmel-like storybook houses with, as Choate puts it, elements of “whimsy.” As time went by, however, newer houses crept into the spaces between the original homes (the Choates’ lot was originally three times its current size), and other architectural styles appeared. Now adobe/stucco homes, English Tudors, New England clapboards, California ranches and more dot the landscape while some neighboring homes hide behind walls of eucalyptus. That’s OK with Choate, who appreciates diversity—a good thing, because these winding, wooded streets are architecturally diverse to the extreme.

Choate and his wife found the house “by accident. We didn’t know this neighborhood existed. In Oakland, if you’ve got kids, schools are paramount. When we found this on the Internet, it was in a good school district, but it was 100 yards from the freeway. I didn’t even want to look at it.” “But I had a friend who knew the street and convinced us to take a look,” Bischer-Choate remembers.

In the 19th century, Temescal was a village—known at one time as Glenwood, Bischer-Choate believes—with its own stop on the railroad line that ran along Telegraph Avenue from downtown Oakland to Berkeley. “And to get passengers for the train,” Choate says, “the railroad company actually developed this little neighborhood.”

Choate estimates the house was built in 1925, and he and his family have lived there for 2 1/2 years. Before they moved in, when the house sold in the 1970s, it was a wreck, Choate says. That homeowner invested in fixing up the interior, ignoring the exterior and landscaping.

When the house changed hands again, the new owner redid the exterior and landscaping, so that didn’t leave much to be done when the Choates bought the house in 2003. The kitchen, for instance, was in move-in condition, complete with a Wolf stove, cherry cabinets and Corian countertops.

Even in the kitchen, the woodsy vista outside is an important element to the house’s ambience, especially as seen from the kitchen window seat. More to the point, the low-to-the-floor placement of the windows in both the living room and the master bedroom is a unique way to bring the outside inside.

“The windows are biased toward the floor, which focuses the view outside, on the landscape. This was thoughtful design on the part of the original architect,” says Choate.

Sometimes, however, on less than bright sunlit days, and especially in the winter, the house in the woods can be dark inside, which is why, when Bischer-Choate chose the interior colors throughout the house, she picked light, bright colors.

Even when almost everything is in “move-in condition,” every house is a work in progress, and that is no different for Choate, who happens to be a third-generation craftsman with a vivid imagination for home design. Choate works with his father, Fred Mork, at Walter Mork Co., a custom sheet metal specialist company in Berkeley. “It’s the curse of the construction guy,”

Choate says. “You always think of what can be done.” What he did was to add 600 feet of “useful space” to his 1,400-square-foot house by doing a total remodel of the attic. In fact, the space has just been finished, and is ready to become a den/office/guest room that will also probably become Patrick’s room “when he is older and needs more independent space,” his father says.

“It’s the loft space we never had,” says Bischer- Choate. “We came up with the ideas as we went.” The idea to use Danish oak for the floors was born when Choate discovered 8,000 square feet of the wood that had been salvaged from a Gap store. The slanted walls and track lighting hint at the elements of charm to come. “We may wall off part of it for the guest room,” Choate says, “but for now, we’ll keep it wide open. Eventually, we’ll add a bath.”

“And a lot of bookshelves,” says Bischer-Choate. “We have about 1,000 books in the garage without a home,” explains Choate.

Now, most of the couple’s ideas for additional changes to their house are directed at the exterior, doing work the previous owner didn’t do. “There are so many possibilities,” says Choate. “We are thinking about a hot tub, and we’d like to change the driveway’s configuration. There are possibilities galore to enhance the landscaping.”

“And we’d like to have a basketball court,” says Bischer-Choate.

“If we cut into the hillside,” says Choate, “we could reclaim some space that we could landscape, make a lawn and a vegetable bed. I’m the dreamer,” he says.

“And I’m more pragmatic,” she responds. Choate uses the garage as a shop where he can work on his projects, which include building a race car and making kayaks. He says his inspiration for home design comes not from magazines or books, but from “things I’ve seen and worked on. When you work in the building trades, you just absorb so much, and what you create becomes part of what you are.” And now, with the creation of the new attic, the house has become something that is not only enchanting, but also unique and very much a part of what this family is about.